Five Reasons Why we Need Wine during Covid Lockdown

 

Why we need booze during lockdown. After vast digital conversations with various specialists and with a sense of commitment to our fellow men and women, your wine communique has found that a lack of wine and other joy-causing elixirs during this lockdown are having negative effects. Five obvious reasons have been identified and are being shared. Any further suggestions welcome.

1. Baking photographs: Committing yourself to baking something like sour-dough bread requires a sober disposition. Creating the mother-starter, pampering it with top-up flour, mixing your dough and then going through days of stretch-and-fold, plus monitoring the proof to ensure a healthy rise….well, this is not something to try if you are inebriated. By regularly imbibing wine, beer or any other alcohol, you will be too pissed to even attempt sour-dough, thus unable to take a photograph of said crusty loaf and post it on your social media timeline. For this, humanity will thank you in decades to come.
2. Streamed music concerts: We understand them. We appreciate. We respect their actions. But really, what music-lover gets a buzz from these music artists streaming songs and performances from empty living-rooms? Watching and listening to Mick Jagger strutting around alone in an empty space trying to appear engaged as he belts out “Gimme Shelter” is enough to make a real, live Leonard Cohen concert look engaging and soulful. The only way one can endure these well-intended streamed music shows from the artists’ swank yet life-less abodes is to get hammered, put on some headphones, and listen to the original tracks while raising a glass to the alacrity of said artists.

3. Reflexes: Opening a bottle of well-aged bottle wine requires concentration, intuitive reflexes and some sleight of hand as you prise the cork-screw into the mature cork and remove it in one piece. (No-use attempting this with a screw-cap wine, unless you need salad-dressing.) To maintain focus, healthy and stimulated nerve-endings as well as all-round alertness, a bottle of old wine should be opened every three days in this period of lockdown where mental challenges are limited to swallowing raw eggs, kneading sour-dough and watching re-runs of the 2020 World Cup Rugby Final.
4. “My fellow South Africans”: These words are known to send more terror running down one’s spine than the phrase a father hears when his teenage-daughter and her tattooed, dope-smoking boyfriend ask for a “talk, in private”. Or when the person you are experiencing lockdown with says “I’m baking sour-dough!” Since Cyril Ramaphosa began uttering those words on television five weeks ago the fear with which they are met has caused three nervous breakdowns, two head-injuries due to thrown crockery and one wrecked HD Samsung television set – and that is just in my street-block. Not to mention the damage to an eye caused by the indiscriminate hurl of a crusty sour-dough slice. To avoid further damage to person, property and – possibly – animal, it is recommended that a stiff drink is allowed to be taken three minutes before the President delivers the four words, allowing one to brace yourself for what is to come. In any event, a flying wine glass does not do nearly as much damage as a sturdy mug filled with tea or a bottle of organic guava-juice.
5. Effective shopping: Wine buyers are more likely to practise social distancing than any other kind of shoppers. By opening-up the wines racks at Woolworths or Checkers, purchasers of wine will respectfully adhere to proposed public-space restrictions by going in and grabbing as many bottles in as short a time as possible, thus lessening the chances of spreading the virus, or be subjected to it. There will be no chit-chatting at the salad fridge, no sharing of tales of lockdown woe at the lentil-and-sprout stand and, definitely no hour-long debates on rises, baking-temperatures and yeast structures at the flour and yeast racks. We are in, out, gone.